Best Distro for Gaming and AMD graphics card compabitily??

[hugo1]

Already tried ubuntu 12.04 , 12.10 , 13.04 , 13.10 and debian wheezy. All very poor perfomance with radeon 6870 with all the propietary drivers installed, so now i'm looking for a new distro , any recommendations?

[JamieLinux]

get a nvidia video card... No offence but amd drivers under linux welll are special.

[bitcrusher]

Depends works perfectly fine for me. Haven't had a game that was on steam that I had issues with amd catalyst drivers. Archlinux. Distro probably doesn't have much bear on graphics card compatibility, try the latest beta drivers.

[JamieLinux]

^^ just my experence tho i have had nothing but issues with amd cards under linux which was the majority of the reason i switched to nvidia ages ago and never looked back... But someone with amd cards might be able to help u better.

[Ōkami Amaterasu]

running a hd 7850 off 13.8 drivers gives me roughly the same performance as windows. are you absolutely 100% sure that you installed and activated the drivers. as to your question, all linux flavors are roughly equal in terms of gaming performance. ubuntu is recommended because it's the most popular distro and is valves primary development target

[blackout24]

You'll have the same performance with the same driver on any distro of course. Do you think they add some magic sauce to make drivers more awesome on other distros?

[Zyro]

AbartigerNorbert a écrit :

You'll have the same performance with the same driver on any distro of course. Do you think they add some magic sauce to make drivers more awesome on other distros?

+1
It might heavily depend on the driver version used and it might depend on the desktop environment and kernel used. Forget distributions.

[hugo1]

AbartigerNorbert a écrit :

You'll have the same performance with the same driver on any distro of course. Do you think they add some magic sauce to make drivers more awesome on other distros?

KDE Works a lot better than Unity for gaming, just sayin

[hugo1]

UAŌkami Amaterasu a écrit :

running a hd 7850 off 13.8 drivers gives me roughly the same performance as windows. are you absolutely 100% sure that you installed and activated the drivers. as to your question, all linux flavors are roughly equal in terms of gaming performance. ubuntu is recommended because it's the most popular distro and is valves primary development target

Yeah, i tried opengl 4.3 beta drivers, 13.4 and 13.8 catalyst drivers

[Teisei]

Xubuntu uses an efficient but beautiful XFCE desktop. Xubuntu is also a part of the Ubuntu family, so it is supported by Canonical. You won't regret installing Xubuntu (13.04).

[blackout24]

a^hugo a écrit :

AbartigerNorbert a écrit :

You'll have the same performance with the same driver on any distro of course. Do you think they add some magic sauce to make drivers more awesome on other distros?

KDE Works a lot better than Unity for gaming, just sayin

Both Unity and KDE do unredirect fullscreen windows so there isn't much off a difference. Also why would you want to switch the distro just to get a different desktop. That makes no sense.

[UnkendTech]

i Use Linux Mint 15 Mate run's fine on my AMD card

[MarcoDePollo]

Just to chime in, AMD's drivers seem to be "two steps forward, one step back", but so far 13.8 beta1 is the best so far. At least for me.

Anywho: make sure that what's causing the performance-problem isn't the CPU switching between frequencies because of the Ondemand-profile.
A quick fix for this:
sudo apt-get install cpufrequtils
cpufreq-info
(this will fail if there is no governor running)
If there are no errors reported and cpufreq-info reports a governor running, change it with

sudo cpufreq-set -g performance

and report back.

[aliceif]

If you want to have a graphical interface for that, the program Jupiter[sourceforge.net] is also an option. It is basically a systray applet that lets you change the CPU profile with just two clicks.
It is available in the repositories of some distros, a ppa for ubuntu and of course also as source code.

[Shark]

if the performance is that terrible, did you even run sudo aticonfig --initial after installing the drivers?

[arc| Gps]

I doubt like others that a different distro will change much.

On openSUSE 12.3 64 bit the Catalyst 13.8 works great.
It solved all performance issues, I had with Serious Sam 3.
Left for Dead 2 runs better too then before.

HD5750 1 gig of ram.

You can try openSUSE, but I would make sure first, the instalation of the catalyst drivers is not just messed up. Because that is most lickely your problem.

Linux is all about choice, but every distro uses about the same kernel.

One more thing about openSUSE, it has a one clcik install for the Catalsyst drivers, but not for the beta versions.
So to install beta drivers on openSUSE, you need the commandline.

Did you try what Wouter sugested ?